Former teacher, self-training Montessorian, in my 8th year of homeschooling; now homeschooling my 2 kids and 1 from another family (he's a 16yo who would like to be referred to as "Bob"), AND looking after my 2 nieces, 5yo and 2yo.

About Me

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Environment Plans for Today

Since we seem to be very slow in the mornings this week, I only did some school stuff on Monday before my niece and nephew showed up. The kids have done other stuff through the week, but I haven't been doing the months of the year as I'd planned and I haven't done any letter work with ds. Things are just so non-routine around here at the moment that I find it difficult. It'll be easier as of next Wed. when dh has to return to school (he's a jr. high teacher--and yes, it was because of teaching jr. high that he thought of homeschooling!) and he'll be up before 8am. Because he'll be up earlier, I'll get myself dressed earlier and be ready to start things. I'll also be getting the kids up at a set time, maybe 6:45-7. You might think I'm cruel, but they're usually up at that hour anyhow!

As for my environment plans today, I need to finish off the den. It's just about done. See? This is what I have left to do.

There were two plastic bags full of paper stuff and other stuff sitting on the floor to the left of the filing cabinet. The black file stand (or whatever it's called) was completely full: the stuff on the top level was the equivalent of 3 levels. There was also a large pile where the planner is sitting. I need to go through the magazine file and put the planner pages (sitting next to the planner) away.

This area needs some tidying. Most of it is receipts. I was supposed to be keeping up-to-date on all this stuff by using Quicken, but I haven't been. Argh. The receipts will go in a receipts file and everything else will go where it needs to.

Ideally I'll do the desk drawer, too. At some point, ALL of the files have to be gone through, but that won't be now!

Since that shouldn't take too long, I'll tackle the 'school room':

You can see this doesn't look like a room that says, "Hey, come spend some time in here!" It's actually a lot better than it was, though! It needs to be nice because it's supposed to be a kind of retreat for those who want to work without any noise or distractions. Also a place to just go lie down on the futon if need be. I expect the 15yo will end up working a lot on her laptop up in this room since there's just too much activity a lot of the time downstairs. I'll have to look into getting a better chair upstairs. I think one of our kitchen chairs with a pad on it would be better than that crummy office chair (it cost me a whole $20, I think, but is about 13 years old!!).

I'm going to have to figure out what I want out of this room as part of the kids' environment. Since I now have to have art materials out of my niece's reach, I had thought about putting them up here, but I think that'll be a pain for the kids. So maybe on the shelves in the family room and some of the materials from there could come up into this room? Although, maybe this room should just have all the textbooks and workbooks and all that. Hm... Decisions, decisions! It has to have all the junk removed from it first, so I'll deal with that and then figure out what to do with the room. I think I do want to move the futon so that it's on the wall next to the door. It opens up access to the bookcases (one of which isn't actually a bookcase) and will probably prevent the continual accumulation of stuff right in front of it.